Fortney: Racial slurs hurt all, but prompt some to action

Valerie Fortney, Calgary Herald

Updated: June 24, 2017

Ramona Big Head, a principal on the Blood Tribe in southern Alberta speaks to reporters in Standoff, Alta., on Thursday, June 22, 2017. A health board employee has been placed on administrative leave after a band member received a racial slur in a text message. Bill Graveland / CP

On Friday morning, though, the fresh memory of Michelle Thrush’s artistic high experienced at the National Arts Centre on Wednesday was replaced by something so stale, it brought her back to earth with a resounding thud.

The co-director of Making Treaty 7, the Calgary-created theatre production that debuted in Ottawa on National Aboriginal Day, is instead remembering a heart-breaking incident from a decade earlier, when a man yelled out a racial slur as she walked across a Calgary street with her two daughters.

“One of my girls dropped something, so I went back to pick it up,” says the co-director of the play that tackles Treaty 7 from the perspective of Canada’s First Nations peoples.

“He yelled out, ‘Hurry the F-up, you dumb squaw.’”

The painful memory resurfaced after Thrush heard about the incident that occurred on Monday on the Blood Reserve/Kainai Nation west of Lethbridge.

“I wrote a play a few years ago called Reclaiming Squaw, because we need to reclaim the word,” she says. “It originally came from the Cree word Iskweyo or Esquao (pronounced like I Skway O), which means woman, giver of life. It was bastardized into Skwaw and used to hurt indigenous women.”

A misdirected text sent by an Alberta Health Services employee Monday after a workshop referred to Ramona Big Head, the principal at Tatsikiisaapo’p Middle School on the Blood reserve, as a “rabid squaw.”

The sender of the text sent an apology to the message’s recipient; she has since been put on paid administrative leave, and Dr. Verna Yiu, president of AHS, has said the employee may face termination.

It’s a sadly disturbing event, not just for the mere fact that this all went down just two days before National Aboriginal Day. It also falls on the heels of a high school grad class last month having a party where they wore war paint and hollered stereotypical chants around a bonfire, along with Tuesday’s press conference by a Lethbridge lawyer to point out the disproportionately high number of indigenous people pulled over by Lethbridge police in a practice called carding.

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You’d think it all might have put these issues on the radar for anyone with half a brain, let alone an AHS employee who was an invited guest on the Blood reserve to talk about — wait for it — education.

“This is nothing new,” says Linda Many Guns, a professor in the Native American studies department at the University of Lethbridge. “The only reason we are talking about this particular incident is, somebody hit the wrong button and sent a message to the wrong person.”

While many of the incidents have occurred in and around Lethbridge, Many Guns doesn’t single it out as an urban hotbed of racism. “Anywhere you have a large population of indigenous people within a larger community, this will happen,” she says, noting that the Blood reserve is only 65 kilometres from that city.

Ramona Big Head, who has yet to receive a direct apology from the sender of the text, says she was first crushed by the slur. “I started to internalize it, like I was my fault,” she says. “I questioned myself, but Ramona the strong woman is back.”

In fact, the experience has been nothing short of transformational.

“I am not going to be silent anymore,” says the educator and current PhD candidate, who has been receiving messages of support from across the country.

“I am going to do everything I can to advocate for those who are experiencing it now, and vindicate those who it happened to in the past who did not have the voice I now have today.”

Michelle Thrush, whose daughters Imajyn, 17, and Indica, 14, are part of the Treaty 7 performing cast, says this is precisely why she continues to tackle such challenging issues as racism and reconciliation.

“All I could think was, ‘It’s time, my God, it’s time,’” she says of the standing ovation they received Wednesday.

Many of us will be cheering them on in their fight, but sadly, it’s one that is still miles from victory.

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